Dick Bennett's focus on US wars and warming and their causes, consequences, and cures

Sunday, June 22, 2014

US IMPERIALISM NEWSLETTER #15

OMNI

NEWSLETTER NUMBER 15, US EMPIRE, US NATIONAL SECURITY
STATE, NATIONALISM, MILITARISM, SURVEILLANCE.
June 22, 2014.

Compiled by Dick Bennett, Building a Culture of Peace
and Justice.

US Imperialism Newsletters

#1 July 3, 2007

#2 Sept. 20, 2007

#3 April 7, 2008

#4 Nov. 30, 2008

#5 September 13, 2011

#6 October 16, 2011

#7 January 16, 2012

#8 June 3, 2012

#9 Oct. 20, 2012

#10 April 5, 2013

#11 June 3, 2013

#12 July 19, 2013

#13 Sept. 3, 2013

#14 March 2, 2014

What’s
at stake: We can decrease
violence in the world by ending US
military empire. We can end the empire
by telling its true history. Stone and
Kuznick, The Untold History of the United
States, and Zinn, A People’s History
of the United States

“The question, patently, is
not whether we are willing to socialize but what. ‘The socialization of death,’ says Michael
Harrington, ‘is, thus far at least, much more generally popular than the
socialization of life.’ The military
have become ardent and dangerous competitors for power in American
society.” J. William Fulbright, The Crippled Giant (1972, 253).

Davies, US Has Supported Fascists, Drug Lords, and
Terrorists in 35 Countries

TomGram, Secret Wars, Nick Turse Special Ops
in 134 Countries

Bruce Gagnon: Gagnon, Boyle, and Muzaffar on
US Machinations

Jimmy Carter: US the Leading War-Monger

Andrew Bacevitch, How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country

Cason, FCNL: US War Budget

Chatterjee and Maira, The ImperialUniversity

Dan Glazebrook, Divide and Ruin: The West’s Imperial Strategy

Recent Related Newsletters

Contact President Obama

Contents of Earlier Empire Newsletters

Tell Congress: No blank check for endless war

The petition reads:"The 2001 Authorization of Use
of Military Force is a blank check for endless war that has been used to
justify some of the worst abuses of executive power since 9/11. With Osama
Bin Laden dead, Al-Qaeda a shell of its former self and our involvement in Afghanistan
quickly diminishing, it’s time to repeal the 2001 AUMF once and for all. Please co-sponsor
Rep. Barbara Lee’s H.R. 4608 to repeal the AUMF."

Automatically add your name:

Dear Dick,

Just three days after 9/11, a panicked
Congress, unsure of the nature of the terrorist threat facing the United States,
passed an overly broad and poorly drafted law known as the Authorization for
Use of Military Force (AUMF).

Progressive champion and congresswoman Barbara Lee (the only member of
Congress with the foresight and courage to vote against it) has called the
AUMF “a blank check for endless war …that gives any president the nearly
unlimited authority to wage limitless war at anytime, anywhere, for any
reason, in perpetuity.”

Now, nearly 13 years
later, it’s time to repeal this blank check for war. Osama Bin Laden is dead,
Al-Qaeda is a shell of its former self, and our involvement in Afghanistan
is quickly diminishing. We must repeal the AUMF once and for all. And Rep.
Lee has introduced bipartisan legislation to do just that.

The heart of the AUMF authorized the
president to “use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations,
organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or
aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored
such organizations or persons in order to prevent any future acts of
international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations
or persons.”

When it was passed, its supporters insisted
that it was not, as Rep. Lee insisted, a “blank check.” But in the 13 years
since its passage, time has sadly proven Rep. Lee right.

Since it’s passage, the AUMF has become the
legal lynchpin for many of the worst abuses of executive power. In an
editorial calling for repeal of the AUMF, theNew
York Timeseditorial
board explains:

Mr. Bush used the authorization law as an
excuse to kidnap hundreds of people — guilty and blameless people alike — and
throw them into secret prisons where many were tortured. He used it as a
pretext to open the GuantánamoBay camp and to
eavesdrop on Americans without bothering to obtain a warrant. He claimed it
as justification for the invasion of Iraq, twisting intelligence to
fabricate a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks.

Unlike Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama does not go as
far as to claim that the Constitution gives him the inherent power to do all
those things. But he has relied on the 2001 authorization to use drones to
kill terrorists far from the Afghan battlefield, and to claim an
unconstitutional power to kill American citizens in other countries based
only on suspicion that they are or might become terrorist threats, without
judicial review.1

The AUMF has no expiration date. So if
Congress fails to repeal it, President Obama or any future president can fall
back on the AUMF’s expansive delegation of war-making authority to wage war
without any further input or authorization from Congress.

This represents a
major abdication of Congress’ responsibility to provide a check and
counterbalance to executive power. It’s long passed time for Congress to
rectify this mistake and repeal the AUMF. Click the link below to
automatically sign the petition:

America's
Coup Machine: Destroying Democracy Since 1953

U.S. efforts to
overthrow foreign governments leave the world less peaceful, less just and less
hopeful.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

April 8, 2014 |

[Many books adduce evidence for Davies’ thesis. Two are by William Blum: Killing Hope and RogueState. If you don’t know this history you have a weak
foundation for assessing US
foreign policy.–Dick]

Soon after the 2004 U.S. coup to depose President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide of Haiti, I heard
Aristide's lawyer Ira Kurzban speaking in Miami.
He began his talk with a riddle: "Why has there never been a coup in
WashingtonD.C.?" The answer: "Because
there is no U.S. Embassy in WashingtonD.C." This
introduction was greeted with wild applause by a mostly Haitian-American
audience who understood it only too well.

Ukraine's former security chief,
Aleksandr Yakimenko, has reported that the coup-plotters who overthrew the
elected government in Ukraine,
"basically lived in the (U.S.) Embassy.
They were there every day." We also know froma
leaked Russian interceptthat
they were in close contact with Ambassador Pyatt and the senior U.S.
official in charge of the coup, former Dick Cheney aide Victoria Nuland, officially
the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs.
And we can assume that many of their days in the Embassy were spent in
strategy and training sessions with their individual CIA case officers.

To place the coup in Ukraine in historical context, this is at least
the 80th time the United
States has organizeda coup or a failed coupin a foreign country since 1953.
That was when President Eisenhower discovered in Iran that the CIA could overthrow
elected governments who refused to sacrifice the future of their people to
Western commercial and geopolitical interests. Most U.S. coups have led to severe
repression, disappearances, extrajudicial executions, torture, corruption,
extreme poverty and inequality, and prolonged setbacks for the democratic
aspirations of people in the countries affected. The plutocratic and
ultra-conservative nature of the forces the U.S.
has brought to power in Ukraine
make it unlikely to be an exception.

Noam Chomsky calls
William Blum's classic,Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since
World War II,"Far
and away the best book on the topic." If you're looking for
historical context for what you are reading or watching on TV about the coup in
Ukraine,
Killing Hope will provide it. The title has never been more apt as we
watch the hopes of people from all regions of Ukraine being sacrificed on the
same altar as those of people in Iran (1953); Guatemala(1954); Thailand (1957);
Laos (1958-60); the Congo (1960); Turkey (1960, 1971 & 1980); Ecuador (1961
& 1963); South Vietnam (1963); Brazil (1964); the Dominican Republic
(1963); Argentina (1963); Honduras (1963 & 2009); Iraq (1963 & 2003);
Bolivia (1964, 1971 & 1980); Indonesia (1965); Ghana (1966); Greece (1967);
Panama (1968 & 1989); Cambodia (1970); Chile (1973); Bangladesh (1975);
Pakistan (1977); Grenada (1983); Mauritania (1984); Guinea (1984); Burkina Faso
(1987); Paraguay (1989); Haiti (1991 & 2004); Russia (1993); Uganda
(1996);and Libya (2011). This list does not include a roughly equal number
of failed coups, nor coups in Africa and elsewhere in which a U.S. role is suspected but
unproven.

The disquieting reality
of the world we live in is that American efforts to destroy democracy, even as
it pretends to champion it, have left the world less peaceful, less just and
less hopeful. When Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature in
2005, at the height of the genocidal American war on Iraq, he devoted much of hisacceptance speechto an analysis of this dichotomy.
He said of the U.S.,
"It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while
masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty,
highly successful act of hypnosis… Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless
it may be, but it is also very clever."

The basic framework of U.S.
coups has hardly evolved since 1953. The main variables between coups in
different places and times have been the scale and openness of the U.S.
role and the level of violence used. There is a strong correlation
between the extent of U.S.
involvement and the level of violence. At one extreme, the U.S. war on Iraq
was a form of regime change that involved hundreds of thousands of U.S.
troops and killed hundreds of thousands of people. On the other hand, the
U.S. role in General
Suharto's coup in Indonesia
in 1965 remained covert even as he killed almost as many people. Only
long after the fact didU.S. officials take credit for their rolein Suharto's campaign of mass murder,
and it will be some time before they brag publicly about their roles in Ukraine.

But as Harold Pinter
explained, the U.S.
has always preferred "low-intensity conflict" to full-scale invasions
and occupations. The CIA and U.S.
special forces use proxies and covert operations to overthrow governments and
suppress movements that challenge America's insatiable quest for
global power. A coup is the climax of such operations, and it is usually
only when these "low-intensity" methods fail that a country becomes a
target for direct U.S.
military aggression. Iraq
only became a target for U.S.
invasion and occupation after afailed CIA coup in June 1996. The U.S.
attacked Panama
in 1989 only afterfive CIA coup attemptsfailed
to remove General Noriega from power. After long careers as CIA agents,
both Hussein and Noriega had exceptional knowledge of U.S. operations and methods that enabled them to
resist regime change by anything less than overwhelming U.S. military force.

But most U.S. coups follow a model that has hardly
changed between 1953 and the latest coup in Ukraine in 2014. This model
has three stages:

1) Creating and
strengthening opposition forces

In the early stages of a
U.S.
plan for regime change, there is little difference between the methods used to
achieve it at the ballot box or by an anti-constitutional coup. Many of
these tools and methods were developed to install right-wing governments in
occupied countries in Europe and Asia after
World War II. They include forming and funding conservative political
parties, student groups, trade unions and media outlets, and running well-oiled
propaganda campaigns both in the country being targeted and in regional,
international and U.S. media.

Post-WWII Italy is a case in point. At
the end of the war, the U.S.
used the American Federation of Labor's agents in France
and Italy
to funnel money through non-communist trade unions to conservative candidates
and political parties. But socialists and communists won a plurality of
votes in the 1946 election in Italy,
and then joined forces to form the Popular Democratic Front for the next
election in 1948. The U.S.
worked with the Catholic Church, conducted a massive propaganda campaign using
Italian-American celebrities like Frank Sinatra, and printed 10 million letters
for Italian-Americans to mail to their relatives in Italy. The U.S. threatened a total cut-off of
aid to the war-ravaged country, where allied bombing had killed 50,000
civilians and left much of the country in ruins.

The FDP was reduced from
a combined 40% of the votes in 1946 to 31% in 1948, leaving Italy in the hands of increasingly
corrupt U.S.-backed coalitions led by the Christian Democrats for the next 46
years. Italy was saved
from an imaginary communist dictatorship, but more importantly from an
independent democratic socialist program committed to workers' rights and to
protecting small and medium-sized Italian businesses against competition from U.S.
multinationals.

The U.S. employed similar tactics in Chilein the 1960s to prevent the election
of Salvador Allende. He came within 3% of winning the presidency in 1958,
so the Kennedy administration sent a team of 100 State Department and CIA
officers to Chile
in what one of them later called a "blatant and almost obscene"
effort to subvert the next election in 1964. The CIA provided more than
half the Christian Democrats' campaign funds and launched a multimedia
propaganda campaign on film, TV, radio, newspapers, posters and flyers.
This classic "red scare" campaign, dominated by images of
firing squads and Soviet tanks, was designed mainly to terrify women. The
CIA produced 20 radio spots per day that were broadcast on at least 45
stations, as well as dozens of fabricated daily "news" broadcasts.
Thousands of posters depicted children with hammers and sickles stamped
on their foreheads. The Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei defeated Allende
by 17%, with a huge majority among women.

But despite the U.S.
propaganda campaign, Allende was finally elected in 1970. When he
consolidated his position in Congressional elections in 1973 despite a virtual U.S.
economic embargo and an ever-escalating destabilization campaign, his fate was
sealed, at the hands of the CIA and the U.S.-backed military, led by General
Pinochet.

In Ukraine, the U.S. has worked since independence
in 1991 to promote pro-Western parties and candidates, climaxing in the
"Orange Revolution" in 2004. But the Western-backed governments
of Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko became just as corrupt and unpopular
as previous ones, and former Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich was elected
President in 2010.

The U.S. employed all its traditional
tactics leading up to the coup in 2014. The U.S. National Endowment for
Democracy (NED) has partially taken over the CIA's role in grooming opposition
candidates, parties and political movements, with an annual budget of $100
million to spend in countries around the world. The NED made no secret of
targeting Ukraine
as a top priority,funding 65 projects there, more than in any
other country. The NED's neoconservative president, Carl Gershman, called
Ukraine "the biggest
prize" in aWashington Post op-edin September 2013, as the U.S.
operation there prepared to move into its next phase.

2) Violent street demonstrations

In November 2013, the
European Union presented President Yanukovich witha 1,500 page "free trade agreement,"
similar to NAFTA or the TPP, but which withheld actual EU membership from Ukraine.
The agreement would have opened Ukraine's borders to Western
exports and investment without a reciprocal opening of the EU's borders. Ukraine,
a major producer of cheese and poultry, would have been allowed to export only
5% of its cheese and 1% of its poultry to the EU. Meanwhile Western firms
could have used Ukraine as a
gateway to flood Russia with
cheap products from Asia. This would have
forced Russia to close its
borders to Ukraine,
shattering the industrial economy of Eastern Ukraine.

Understandably, and for
perfectly sound reasons as a Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovich rejected
the EU agreement. This was the signal for pro-Western and right-wing
groups in Kiev
to take to the street. In the West, we tend to interpret street
demonstrations as representing surges of populism and democracy. But we
should distinguish left-wing demonstrations against right-wing governments from
the kind of violent right-wing demonstrations that have always been part of U.S.
regime change strategy.

In Tehran in 1953, the CIA spent a million
dollars to hire gangsters and "extremely competent professional
organizers", as the CIA's Kermit Roosevelt called them, to stage
increasingly violent demonstrations, until loyal and rebel army units were
fighting in the streets of Tehran
and at least 300 people were killed. The CIA spent millions more to bribe
members of parliament and other influential Iranians. Mossadegh was
forced to resign, and the Shah restored Western ownership of the oil industry.
BP divided the spoils with American firms, until the Shah was overthrown
26 years later by the Iranian Revolution and the oil industry was
re-nationalized. This pattern of short-term success followed by eventual
independence from U.S.
interests is a common result of CIA coups, most notably in Latin America, where
they have led many of our closest neighbors to become increasingly committed to
political and economic independence from the United States.

In Haiti in 2004, 200 U.S. special forces trained 600 FRAPH militiamen
and other anti-Lavalas forces at a training camp across the border in the Dominican Republic.
These forces then invaded northern Haiti and gradually spread violence
and chaos across the country to set the stage for the overthrow of President
Aristide.

In Ukraine, street protests turned
violent in January 2014 as the neo-NaziSvoboda Partyand theRight
Sector militiatook
charge of the crowds in the streets. The Right Sector militia only
appeared in Ukraine
in the past 6 months, although it incorporated existing extreme-right groups
and gangs. It is partly funded by Ukrainian exiles in the U.S. and Europe,
and may be a creation of the CIA. After Right Sector seized government
buildings, parliament outlawed the protests and the police reoccupied part of Independence Square,
killing two protesters.

On February 7th, the
Russians published anintercepted
phone callbetweenAssistant
Secretary of State Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt. The
intercept revealed that U.S.
officials were preparing to seize the moment for a coup in Ukraine. The transcript reads
like a page from a John Le Carre novel: "I think we're in play… we could
land jelly-side up on this one if we move fast." Their main concern
was to marginalize heavyweight boxing champion Vitali Klitschko, who had become
the popular face of the "revolution" and was favored by the European
Union, and to ensure that U.S.
favorite Arseniy Yatsenyuk ended up in the Prime Minister's office.

On the night of February
17th, Right Sector announced a march from Independence Square to the parliament
building on the 18th. This ignited several days of escalating violence in
whichthe death tollrose to 110 people killed, including
protesters, government supporters and 16 police officers. More than a
thousand people were wounded.Vyacheslav Veremyi, a well-known reporter for
a pro-government newspaper, was dragged out of a taxi near Independence Square and shot to death in
front of a crowd of onlookers. Right Sector broke into an armory near
Lviv and seized military weapons, and there is evidence of both sides using
snipers to fire from buildings in Kiev
at protesters and police in the streets and the square below. Former security chief Yakimenkobelieves that snipers firing from the
Philharmonic building were U.S.-paid foreign mercenaries, like the snipers from
the former Yugoslavia who
earn up to$2,000
per day shooting soldiers in Syria.

As violence raged in the
streets, the government and opposition parties held emergency meetings and reached
two truce agreements, one on the night of February 19th andanother on the 21st, brokered by the foreign
ministers of France, Germany and Poland. But Right Sector
rejected both truces and called for the "people's revolution" to
continue until Yanukovich resigned and the government was completely removed
from power.

3) The coup d'etat.

The creation and
grooming of opposition forces and the spread of violence in the streets are
deliberate strategies to create a state of emergency as a pretext for removing
an elected or constitutional government and seizing power. Once the coup
leaders have been trained and prepared by their CIA case officers, U.S.
officials have laid their plans and street violence has broken down law and
order and the functioning of state institutions, all that remains is to strike
decisively at the right moment to remove the government and install the coup
leaders in its place. In Iran,
faced with hundreds of people being killed in the streets, Mohammad Mosaddegh
resigned to end the bloodshed. In Chile, General Pinochet launched
air strikes on the presidential palace. In Haiti
in 2004, U.S.
forces landed to remove President Aristide and occupy the country.

In Ukraine, Vitaly Klitschko announced
that parliament would open impeachment proceedings against Yanukovich, but,
later that day, lacking the 338 votes required for impeachment, a smaller
number of memberssimply approved a declarationthat Yanukovich "withdrew from
his duties in an unconstitutional manner," and appointed Oleksandr
Turchynov of the opposition Fatherland Party as Acting President. Right
Sector seized control of government buildings and patrolled the streets.
Yanukovich refused to resign, calling this an illegal coup d'etat.
The coup leaders vowed to prosecute him for the deaths of protesters, but
he escaped to Russia.
Arseniy Yatsenyuk was appointed Prime Minister on February 27th, exactly
as Nuland and Pyatt had planned.

The main thing that
distinguishes the U.S. coup
in Ukraine from the majority
of previous U.S.
coups was the minimal role played by the Ukrainian military. Since 1953,
most U.S.
coups have involved using local senior military officers to deliver the final
blow to remove the elected or ruling leader. The officers have then been
rewarded with presidencies, dictatorships or other senior positions in new
U.S.-backed regimes. The U.S. military cultivates military-to-military
relationships to identify and groom future coup leaders, and President Obama's
expansion of U.S. special forces operations to134 countries around the worldsuggests that this process is ongoing
and expanding, not contracting.

But the neutral or
pro-Russian position of the Ukrainian military since it was separated from the
Soviet Red Army in 1991 made it an impractical tool for an anti-Russian coup.
So Nuland and Pyatt's signal innovation in Ukraine was to use the neo-Nazi
Svoboda Party and Right Sector as a strike force to unleash escalating violence
and seize power. This also required managing Svoboda and Right Sector's uneasy
alliance with Fatherland and UDAR, the two pro-Western opposition parties who
won 40% between them in the2012 parliamentary election.

Historically, about half
of all U.S.
coups have failed, and success is never guaranteed. But few Americans
have ended up dead or destitute in the wake of a failed coup. It is always
the people of the target country who pay the price in violence, chaos, poverty
and instability, while U.S.
coup leaders like Nuland and Pyatt often get a second - or 3rd or 4th or 5th -
bite at the apple, and will keep rising through the ranks of the State
Department and the CIA. Direct U.S.
military intervention in Ukraine
was not an option before the coup, but now the coup itself may destabilize the
country and plunge it into economic collapse, regional disintegration or
conflict with Russia,
creating new and unpredictable conditions in which NATO intervention could
become feasible.

Russia has proposeda
reasonable solution to the crisis. To resolve the tensions between
Eastern and Western Ukraine over their respective political and economic links
with Russia and the West,
the Russians have proposed a federal system in which both Eastern and Western Ukraine would have much greater autonomy.
This would be more stable that the present system in which each tries to
dominate the other with the support of their external allies, turning Ukraine and all its people into pawns of
Western-NATO expansion and Russia's
efforts to limit it. The Russian proposal includes a binding commitment
that Ukraine
would remain neutral and not join NATO. A few weeks ago, Obama and Kerry
seemed to beready to take this off-rampfrom the crisis. The delay in
agreeing to Russia's
seemingly reasonable proposal may be only an effort to save face, or it may
mean that theneocons who engineered the coupare still
dictating policy in Washington
and that Obama and Kerry may be ready to risk a further escalation of the
crisis.

The U.S. coup machine has also been at work in Venezuela,
whereit already failed once in 2002. Raul
Capote, a former Cuban double agent whoworked
with the CIA in Cuba and Venezuela, recently described its long-term
project to build right-wing opposition movements among upper- and middle-class
students in Venezuelan universities, which are now bearing fruit in
increasingly violent street protests and vigilantism. Thirty-six people
have been killed, including six police officers and at least 5 opposition
protesters. The protests began exactly a month after municipal elections
in December, in which the governmentwon the popular vote by almost 10%, far more
than the 1.5% margin in the presidential election last April. As in Chile
in 1973, electoral success by an elected government is often the cue for the
CIA to step up its efforts, moving beyond propaganda and right-wing politics to
violence in the streets, and the popularity of the Venezuelan government seems
to have provoked precisely that reaction.

Another feature of U.S.
coups is the role of the Western media in publicizing official cover stories
and suppressing factual journalism. This role has also been consistent
since 1953, but it has evolved as corporate media have consolidated their
monopoly power. By their very nature, coups are secret operations and U.S.
media are prohibited from revealing "national security" secrets about
them, such as the names of CIA officers involved. By only reporting
official cover stories, they become unwitting co conspirators in the critical
propaganda component of these operations. But the U.S. corporate media have turned vice into
virtue, relishing their role in the demonization of America's
chosen enemies and cheerleading U.S.
efforts to do them in. They brush U.S.
responsibility for violence and chaos under the carpet, and sympathetically
present U.S.
policy as a well-meaning effort to respond to the irrational and dangerous
behavior of others.

This is far more than is
required by strict observance of secrecy laws, and it reveals a great deal
about the nature of the media environment we live in. The Western media
as it exists today under near-monopoly corporate ownership is a more sophisticated
and total propaganda system than early 20th century propagandists ever dreamed
of. As media corporations profit from Western geopolitical and commercial
expansion, the propaganda function that supports that expansion is an
integrated part of their business model, not something exceptional they do
under duress from the state. But to expect factual journalism about U.S.
coups from such firms is to misunderstand who and what they are.

Recent studies have foundthat people gain a better grasp of
current affairs from John Stewart's Daily Show on Comedy Central than from
watching "news" networks. People who watch no "news"
at all have more knowledge of international affairs than people who watch MSNBC
or Fox News. A previous surveyconducted 3 months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq
found that 52% of Americans believed that U.S.
forces in Iraq
had found clear evidence of links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Among Republicans who said they were following "news on Iraq
very closely", the figure was 78%, compared with only 68% among
Republicans at large.

If the role of the
corporate media was to provide factual journalism, these studies would be a
terrible indictment of their performance. But once we acknowledge their
actual role as the propaganda arm of an expansionist political and economic
system, then we can understand that promoting the myths and misinformation that
sustain it are a central part of what they do. In that light, they are
doing a brilliant job on Ukraine
as they did on Iraq,
suppressing any mention of the U.S.
role in the coup and pivoting swiftly away from the unfolding crisis in
post-coup Ukraine to focus
entirely on attacking President Putin for reclaiming Crimea.
On the other hand, if you're looking for factual journalism about the U.S.
coup machine, you should probably turn off your TV and keep reading reliable
sources likeAlternet,Consortium NewsandVenezuela
Analysis.

Nicolas J. S. Davies is the author
of Blood
On Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. He wrote the
chapter on "Obama At War" for the book, Grading the 44th
President: A Report Card on Barack Obama's First Term as a Progressive Leader.

These days, when I check out the latest news on Washington’s global
war-making, I regularly find at least one story that fits a new category in my
mind that I call: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Take last Saturday'sWashington Postreportby Craig
Whitlock on the stationing of less than two dozen U.S.
“military advisers” in war-torn Somalia.
They’ve been there for months, it turns out, and their job is “to advise and
coordinate operations with African troops fighting to wrest control of the
country from the al-Shabab militia.” If you leave aside the
paramilitarized CIA (which has long had asecret base and prisonin
that country), those advisers represent the first U.S. military boots on the ground there
since the infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident of 1993. As soon as I read the
piece, I automatically thought: Given the history of the U.S. in Somalia, including the
encouragement of a disastrous 2006Ethiopian invasionof
that country, what could possibly go wrong?

Some days when I read the news, I can’t help but think of
thelate Chalmers Johnson; on others, the satirical newspaper theOnioncomes to mind. If Washington didit-- and by “it,” I mean invade and
occupy a country, intervene in a rebellion against an autocrat, intervene in a
civil war, launch a drone campaign against a terror outfit, or support and
train local forces against some group the U.S. doesn’t like -- you already know
all you need to know. Any version of the above hasrepeatedly translatedinto
one debacle or disaster after another. In the classic term of CIA
tradecraft that Johnson took for the title ofa book-- a
post-9/11 bestseller -- send adrone over Yemenwith
the intent to kill, kick down doors in Afghanistan or Iraq, put U.S. boots back
on the ground in Somalia and you’re going to be guaranteed “unintended
consequences” and undoubtedly some form of “blowback” as well. To use a
sports analogy, if since 9/11 Washington
has been the globe’s cleanup hitter, it not only hasn’t managed to knock a
single ball out of the park, it’s struck out enough times to make those
watching dizzy, and it’s batting .000.

You would think that someone in the nation’s capital
might have drawn a lesson or two from such a record, something simple like:Don’t
do it! But -- here’s where theOnionshould be able to run riot -- there
clearly is no learning curve in Washington.
Tactics change, but the ill-conceived, ill-begotten, ill-fated Global War on
Terror (GWOT), which long agooutranits own
overblown name, continues without end, and without either successes of any
lasting sort or serious reconsideration. In this period, al-Qaeda, a
small-scale organization capable of immodest terror acts every couple of years
and, despite the fantasies ofHomelandand Fox News, without a sleeper cell
in the United States,
managed, with Washington’s
help, to turn itself into a global franchise. The more the Bush and Obama
administrations went after it, the more al-Qaeda wannabe organizations sprang
up across the Greater Middle East and north Africa like mushrooms after a
soaking rain.

The earliest GWOTsters, allOnion-style
satirists, believed that the U.S.
was destined to rule the world till Hell froze over. Their idea of asnappy quipwas
“Everyone wants to go to Baghdad.
Real men want to go to Tehran,”
and they loved to refer to the Greater Middle East as “the arc of instability.” That, mind you, was before they
sent in the U.S.
military. Today, 12 years later, that long-gone world looks like an arc
of stability, while the U.S.
has left the Greater Middle East, from North Africa to Syria, from Yemen
to Afghanistan,
a roiling catastrophe zone of conflict, refugees, death, and destruction.
As it happened, the Bush administration’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq proved to be the only genuine
weapons of mass destruction around, loosing, among other things, what could
prove to be thegreat religious warof
modern times.

The
Special Ops SurgeAmerica’s Secret War in 134 Countries
ByNick Turse

They operate in the green glow of night vision in
Southwest Asia and stalk through the jungles of South
America. Theysnatchmen from
their homes in theMaghrebandshoot it outwith
heavily armed militants in the Horn of Africa. They feel the salty spray
while skimming over the tops of waves from the turquoise Caribbean
to the deep blue Pacific. They conduct missions in the oppressive heat of
Middle Eastern deserts and thedeep freezeof Scandinavia. All over the planet, the Obama
administration iswaging a secret
warwhose full extent
has never been fully revealed -- until now.

Since September 11, 2001, U.S. Special Operations forces
have grown in every conceivable way, from their numbers to their budget.
Most telling, however, has been the exponential rise in special ops deployments
globally. This presence -- now, in nearly 70% of the world’s nations --
provides new evidence of the size and scope of a secret war being waged from
Latin America to the backlands of Afghanistan, from training missions
with African allies to information operations launched in cyberspace.

In the waning days of the Bush presidency, Special
Operations forces were reportedlydeployedin about 60 countries around the
world. By 2010, that number had swelled to 75,accordingto
Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of theWashington
Post. In 2011, Special Operations Command (SOCOM) spokesman
Colonel Tim NyetoldTomDispatch that the total would reach
120. Today, that figure has risen higher still.

In 2013, elite U.S. forces were deployed in 134
countries around the globe, according to Major Matthew Robert Bockholt of SOCOM
Public Affairs. This 123% increase during the Obama years demonstrates
how, in addition to conventional wars and aCIA drone campaign, public diplomacy andextensive electronic spying, the U.S. has engaged in still another
significant and growing form of overseas power projection. Conducted
largely in the shadows by America’s
most elite troops, the vast majority of these missions take place far from
prying eyes, media scrutiny, or any type of outside oversight, increasing the
chances of unforeseen blowback and catastrophic consequences.

Growth Industry

Formally established in 1987, Special Operations Command
has grown steadily in the post-9/11 era. SOCOM is reportedly on
track to reach 72,000 personnel in 2014, up from 33,000 in 2001. Funding
for the command has also jumped exponentially as its baseline budget, $2.3
billion in 2001, hit $6.9 billion in 2013 ($10.4 billion, if you add in
supplemental funding). Personnel deployments abroad have skyrocketed,
too, from 4,900 “man-years” in 2001 to 11,500 in 2013.

A recentinvestigationby
TomDispatch, using open source government documents and news releases as well
as press reports,foundevidence
that U.S. Special Operations forces were deployed in or involved with the
militaries of 106 nations around the world in 2012-2013. For more than a
month during the preparation of thatarticle, however, SOCOM failed to provide accurate statistics
on the total number of countries to which special operators -- Green Berets and
Rangers, Navy SEALs and Delta Force commandos, specialized helicopter crews,
boat teams, and civil affairs personnel -- were deployed. “We don’t
just keep it on hand,” SOCOM’s Bockholt explained in a telephone interview once
the article had been filed. “We have to go searching through stuff.
It takes a long time to do that.” Hours later, just prior to publication,
he provided an answer to a question I first asked in November of last
year. “SOF [Special Operations forces] were deployed to 134 countries”
during fiscal year 2013, Bockholt explained in an email.

Globalized Special Ops

Last year, Special Operations Command chief Admiral
William McRaven explained his vision for special ops globalization. In a
statement to the House Armed Services Committee, he said:

“USSOCOM is enhancing its global network of SOF to
support our interagency and international partners in order to gain expanded
situational awareness of emerging threats and opportunities. The network
enables small, persistent presence in critical locations, and facilitates
engagement where necessary or appropriate...”

While that “presence” may be small, the reach and
influence of those Special Operations forces are another matter. The 12%
jump in national deployments -- from 120 to 134 -- during McRaven’s tenure
reflects his desire to put boots on the ground just about everywhere on Earth.
SOCOM will not name the nations involved, citing host nation
sensitivities and the safety of American personnel, but the deployments we do
know about shed at least some light on the full range of missions being carried
out by America’s
secret military.

Last April and May, for
instance, Special Ops personnel took part in training exercises in Djibouti, Malawi,
and the SeychellesIslands in the Indian Ocean.
In June, U.S. Navy SEALs joined Iraqi, Jordanian, Lebanese, and other allied
Mideast forces for irregular warfare simulations in Aqaba, Jordan.
The next month, Green Berets traveled to Trinidad and Tobago to carry out
small unit tactical exercises with local forces. In August, Green Beretsconductedexplosives training with Honduran
sailors. In September,according tomedia reports, U.S. Special Operations forces
joined elite troops from the 10 member countries of the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations -- Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore,
Thailand, Brunei, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar (Burma), and Cambodia -- as well as
their counterparts from Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, China,
India, and Russia for a US-Indonesian joint-funded coun­terterrorism exercise
held at a training center in Sentul, West Java.

In October, elite U.S. troopscarried outcommando
raids in Libya and Somalia,kidnappinga
terror suspect in the former nation while SEALs killed at least one militant in
the latter before beingdriven offunder
fire. In November, Special Ops troops conducted humanitarian operations
in the Philippines
to aid survivors of Typhoon Haiyan. The next month, members of the 352nd
Special Operations Groupconducteda training exercise involving
approximately 130 airmen and six aircraft at an airbase in England and Navy SEALs were wounded whileundertakingan
evacuation mission in South Sudan. Green
Berets then rang in the new year with a January 1st combat mission alongside
elite Afghan troops in Bahlozi village in Kandahar
province.

Deployments in 134 countries, however, turn out not to be
expansive enough for SOCOM. In November 2013, the command announced that it was
seeking to identify industry partners who could, under SOCOM’s Trans Regional
Web Initiative, potentially “develop new websites tailored to foreign
audiences.” These would join an existing global network of 10 propaganda
websites, run by various combatant commands and made to look like legitimate
news outlets, including CentralAsiaOnline.com,Sabahiwhich
targets the Horn of Africa; an effort aimed at the Middle East known as
Al-Shorfa.com; and another targeting Latin America
calledInfosurhoy.com.

SOCOM’s push into cyberspace is mirrored by a concerted
effort of the command to embed itself ever more deeply inside the
Beltway. “I have folks in every agency here in Washington,
D.C. -- from the CIA, to the FBI, to the
National Security Agency, to the National Geospatial Agency, to the Defense
Intelligence Agency,” SOCOM chief Admiral McRaven said during a panel
discussion at Washington’s WilsonCenter
last year. Speaking at the Ronald Reagan Library in November, he put the
number of departments and agencies where SOCOM is nowentrenchedat 38.

134 Chances for Blowback

Although elected in 2008 by many who saw him as anantiwar candidate, President Obama has proved to be a
decidedly hawkish commander-in-chief whose policies have already produced
notable instances of what in CIA trade-speak has long been calledblowback. While the Obama administration oversaw a U.S.
withdrawal from Iraq (negotiatedby
his predecessor), as well as adrawdownof U.S.
forces in Afghanistan (after amajor military surgein
that country), the president has presided over a ramping up of the U.S.
military presence inAfrica,
areinvigorationofeffortsinLatin America, and tough talk about a rebalancing or “pivot to Asia” (even if it has amounted to little as of
yet).

The White House has also overseen an exponential
expansion of America’s
drone war. While President Bush launched 51 such strikes, President Obama
haspresidedover
330, according to research by the London-based Bureau of Investigative
Journalism. Last year, alone, the U.S. also engaged in combat operations
in Afghanistan,Libya,Pakistan,Somalia, andYemen. Recent revelations from National Security Agency
whistleblowerEdward Snowdenhave
demonstrated the tremendous breadth and global reach of U.S. electronic surveillance during
the Obama years. And deep in the shadows, Special Operations forces are
now annually deployed to more than double the number of nations as at the end
of Bush’s tenure.

In recent years, however, the unintended consequences of U.S.
military operations have helped to sow outrage and discontent, setting whole
regions aflame. More than 10 years after America’s
“mission accomplished” moment, seven years after its much
vauntedsurge, the Iraq
that America
helped make isin flames.
A country withno al-Qaeda presencebefore
theU.S. invasionand
a governmentopposedto
America’s enemies in Tehran now has a central governmentalignedwith
Iran andtwo citiesflying
al-Qaeda flags.

A more recent U.S. military intervention to aid the
ouster of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi helped send neighboring Mali, a
U.S.-supported bulwark against regional terrorism, into a downward spiral, saw
a coup there carried out by a U.S.-trained officer, ultimately led to a bloody
terror attack on an Algerian gas plant, and helped to unleash nothing short of aterror diasporain the region.

The Obama presidency has seen the U.S. military’s elite tactical
forces increasingly used in an attempt to achieve strategic goals. But
with Special Operations missions kept under tight wraps, Americans have little
understanding of where their troops are deployed, what exactly they are doing,
or what the consequences might be down the road. As retired Army Colonel
Andrew Bacevich, professor of history and international relations at BostonUniversity,
has noted, the utilization of Special Operations forces during the Obama years
has decreased military accountability, strengthened the “imperial presidency,”
and set the stage for a war without end. “In short,” hewroteat
TomDispatch, “handing war to the special operators severs an already too
tenuous link between war and politics; it becomes war for its own sake.”

Without a clear picture of where the military’s covert
forces are operating and what they are doing, Americans may not even recognize
the consequences of and blowback from our expanding secret wars as they wash
over the world. But if history is any guide, they will be felt -- from
Southwest Asia to the Mahgreb, the Middle East to Central Africa, and, perhaps
eventually, in the United States as well.

In his blueprint for the future,SOCOM
2020, Admiral McRaven has touted the globalization of U.S.
special ops as a means to “project power, promote stability, and prevent
conflict.” Last year, SOCOM may have done just the opposite in 134
places.

From the opening missile salvo in the skies over Afghanistan
in 2001 to a secret strike in the Philippines
early this year, or a future in which drones dogfight off the coast of Africa,
Terminator Planet takes you to the front lines of combat, Washington war rooms, and beyond.

In 2008, when the US National
Intelligence Council issued its latest report meant for the administration of
newly elected President Barack Obama, it predicted that the planet's "sole
superpower" would suffer a modest decline and a soft landing fifteen years
hence. In his new book The United States of Fear, Tom Engelhardt makes clear
that Americans should don their crash helmets and buckle their seat belts...

I am learning so much from all this work going on now
about Ukraine.
Statements, or even meanderings, have been slow to come from the leadership of
many peace groups in the US
and then they've been very cautious. Caution even from folks who know
what is really going on. The old ‘anti-reds’ hysteria from the past still
lives here in the US of A. But the up swell of interest and concern from
every day grassroots activists is strong and they are seeing the bigger
picture.

The big picture is what drives me.... I’m a visual learner. Once I get a
feel for what is going on I can then find the rest of the pieces filling in the
puzzle on the wall. So here are a few more sharings of some good honest
thinking by some stalwarts in the peace movement.

I suspect this entire Ukraine Crisis had been war-gamed
and war planned quite some time ago at the highest levels of US/NATO. Notice
DOD slipped 2 US warships
into the Black Sea just before the Olympics
under a patently absurd pretext. In other words, what we are seeing unfold here
is a US/NATO War Plan. They instigated the fascist coup against Yanukovich.
They anticipated that Putin would then respond by taking over Crimea.
I suspect the US/NATO/EU response will be to introduce military forces into
Western Ukraine and Kiev and thus make Ukraine
a de facto member of NATO, which has been their objective all along. They have
already anticipated what Putin’s next move after that will be. Notice also the
massive anti-Russian campaign by the Western News Media working in lock-step
with each other. Another sign that all this has been planned well in
advance. I suspect that US/NATO/EU figure that Putin knows they
have this offensive, first-strike strategic nuclear capability with a
rudimentary ABM/BMD capability so that at the end of the day he will be forced
to stand down—or else. Compellence as opposed to Deterrence. Just like
during the Cuban Missile Crisis. That is where this US/NATO/EU War Plan is
heading on the assumptions that they can keep their deliberate Escalation
Dominance under their control and that at the end day Putin will be forced to
stand down just like Khrushchev did and for the same reasons. That would
leave US/NATO/EU in control of at least half of Ukraine as a de facto NATO member
state.

Last summer when I went to a conference in the Philippines
on the US "pivot"
to Asia-Pacific I met Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, President of the International
Movement for a Just World in Malaysia.
This white haired elder man, in a wheel chair, glowed with a beauty of love and
joy. When he spoke about globalization's control of governments I was
listening hard. He wrote this (and more)here:

If Ukraine
is on the brink of a catastrophe, it is mainly because the present regime in Kiev and its supporters,
backed by certain Western powers had violated a fundamental principle of
democratic governance. They had ousted a democratically elected president
through illegal means. President Viktor Yanukovich who had come to power
through a free and fair election in 2010 should have been removed through the
ballot-box.

His opponents not only betrayed a democratic principle. They subverted a ‘Peace
Deal’ signed between them and Yanukovich on 21 February 2014 in which the
latter had agreed to form a national unity government within 10 days that would
include opposition representatives; reinstate the 2004 Constitution; relinquish
control over Ukraine’s security services; and hold presidential and parliamentary
elections by December 2014. According to the Deal, endorsed by Germany, France
and Poland,
Yanukovich would remain president until the elections.

His co-signatories had no intention of honouring the agreement. Without
following procedures, parliament, with the backing of the military, voted
immediately to remove Yanukovich and impeach him. The Parliamentary Speaker was
elected interim President and after a few days a new regime was installed.

- Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, Malaysia

A key bit that must continually be inserted into discussions about Ukraine is NATO expansion and US "missile defense" deployments
encircling Russia.

When the Berlin Wall fell in December of 1991 the Soviet
Union disintegrated into fifteen separate countries. Daddy
Bush’s Secretary of State James Baker promised Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s last leader, that NATO would not expand
one-centimeter eastward. Once Clinton
took over he broke the promise and since that time NATO has been on
steroids. NATOnow
includes CzechRepublic,
Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria,
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania,
Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia,
Albania, and Croatia.... with Georgia
and Ukraine
waiting in the wings.

If you are Russia
you are freaking out. Also consider NATO bases encircling Russia and new
"missile defense" deployments going into Poland, Romania, Turkey and
on US Navy Aegis destroyers (outfitted with MD interceptors) in the Black,
Barents, Bering, and Mediterranean Seas. It's a chess game and US-NATO
has now checkmated Russia.
The ultimatum is either surrender (your natural gas, oil and national treasury)
or face a unified NATO economic freeze and war if need be. It’s
high-stakes… high-risk strategy…Texas
style.

Admittedly this is a grab by the oil-i-garchs for total global control.
The people are the pawns, easily cast aside when need be. The way I
figure it, my job is to keep learning about all this and sharing it with
others. Don’t fear the anti-commie BS that is used to put people back
‘into their place’. I don’t like people telling me what I can do or say….
I heard enough of that stuff while in the Air Force during the Vietnam
War.

Help illuminate the picture on the wall for more to see. We've all,
worldwide, got to create a unified demand to shut the capitalist war system
down. The corporate fascists have taken over. It's the high-tech
version of feudalism.

Jimmy Carter: "America
As the No. 1 Warmonger"
David Daley, Salon, Reader
Supported News, April 10, 2014Daley writes: "The rest of the world, almost
unanimously, looks at America
as the No. 1 warmonger."READ MORE

Your letter can do more than get your senators' attention—it can get the attention of
others in your community.Most people don't
realize that the biggest chunk of their tax dollars goes to pay for wars.Yet we're only investing pennies
on the dollar to solve critical problems that need government attention.

New Book - Divide and RDivide and
Ruin: The West’s Imperial Strategy in an Age of Crisis

Liberation Media
announces the release of a new book by Dan Glazebrook

January 3, 2014

Divide and Ruin: The
West’s Imperial Strategy in an Age of Crisisis a collection of articles by
British author Dan Glazebrook. Originally published in The Guardian,
Morning Star, Counterpunch, Z Magazine and Asia Times, Glazebrook has
assembled these writings to illustrate a new strategy by U.S., British and other
imperialist powers. This new strategy employs proxy military forces to
achieve regime change in any country that resists imperialism.

Glazebrook
shows the brutality of the West’s racist and exploitative foreign policy
against the global South, citing examples from Libya,
Syria, and elsewhere in
the Middle East, Asia and Africa. He
explores in detail the role of AFRICOM as an imperialist force operating on
that continent. Economic and social issues in Britain also come under
scrutiny, plus the role of the media and social movements there.

Divide and Ruinargues for new counterweights to the Empire’s
plunder in a winning appeal to reason and humanity.

Praise for Dan
Glazebrook andDivide and Ruin: The West’s
Imperial Strategy in an Age of Crisis

“Dan
Glazebrook analyzes a new overarching strategy employed by U.S. and British imperialism since the
collapse of the Soviet Union and the end
of so-called Cold War. Limited by its relative decline in the context of
the global economy and unable to sustain the Bush-like adventurism that led
to the Iraq
debacle, the Empire, arguesDivide and Ruin,seeks now to rely primarily on
proxy military forces against those it targets for regime change. The goal
though is nothing other than the long-term weakening of any country that
serves as a regional counter-weight to the absolute dominance of
imperialism. From Glazebrook’s view, U.S. and British foreign policy
should be viewed as a wrecking ball of sorts aimed at weakening the
strongest and most independent players in the Global South.

—Brian Becker,
National Director, ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism)

“Dan
Glazebrook is one of a handful of authors that I depend upon for
valuable insight, information and nourishment. While most of the
intellectual world is rushing to support the next NATO act of aggression in
the name of human rights, Glazebrook shows in this book how it is NATO and
the West which are undermining peace, security and human rights throughout
the globe.”

—Daniel Kovalik,
Professor of International Human Rights, University of PittsburghSchool
of Law

“Dan
Glazebrook gives clear analysis of very nuanced and layered world affairs.
He reports and exposes the excesses of imperialists while enlightening a
growing critical mass of people concerned about what their governments do
in their name. This work is an important read for anyone seeking
understanding and a more equal and free world.”

—Brian E. Muhammad,
Contributing Writer,The Final Call

“In Divide and Ruin,
Dan Glazebrook has expertly laid bare the connections between capitalism,
militarism and economic crisis today, and the devastating impact Western
foreign policy has had on the nations of the global South. Glazebrook
demonstrates that, above all, the imperialist countries are determined to
combat the ‘threat of a good example’, the possibility that the economic
policies pursued by Third World states might be effectively determined by
their own citizens in their own interests, and not by Western capitalists
and their hangers-on. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is
skeptical about the rationales commonly given for today’s wars and who
wants to cut through the fog of mass media propaganda.”

—Dr. Zak Cope,
author of Dimensions of Prejudice: Towards a
Political Economy of Bigotry and Divided World Divided
Class: Global Political Economy and the Stratification of Labour under
Capitalism.

Divide and Ruin: The West’s
Imperial Strategy in an Age of Crisis Paperback, 146 pages, $14.95.December 2013, by
Liberation Media ISBN: 978-0-9910303-0-9 • Library of Congress Control
Number: 2013954053

The ImperialUniversity:

Academic
Repression and Scholarly Dissent

From the front
lines of the war on academic freedom, linking the policing of knowledge to
the relationship between universities, militarism, and neoliberalism

The Imperial
Universitybrings together scholars to
explore the policing of knowledge by explicitly linking the academy to the
broader politics of militarism, racism, nationalism, and neoliberalism that
define the contemporary imperial state. Based on multidisciplinary research,
autobiographical accounts, and even performance scripts, this urgent analysis
offers sobering insights into varied manifestations of “the imperial
university.”

The public
space of higher education is under siege.The ImperialUniversityinterrogates in brilliant detail the
nature of such attacks and the hidden structures of power and politics that
define them. But it does more in providing a passionate call to rethink
higher education as part of a future in which learning is linked to social
change. A crucial book for anyone who imagines the university as both an
essential public sphere and an index of what a democracy

Cultures of United States
Imperialism(New
Americanists).

Book Description

Publication Date:January 26, 1994

Cultures
of United States Imperialismrepresents a major paradigm shift
that will remap the field of American Studies. Pointing to a glaring blind
spot in the basic premises of the study of American culture, leading critics
and theorists in cultural studies, history, anthropology, and literature
reveal the "denial of empire" at the heart of American Studies.
Challenging traditional definitions and periodizations of imperialism, this
volume shows how international relations reciprocally shape a dominant
imperial culture at home and how imperial relations are enacted and contested
within the United States.
Drawing on a broad range of interpretive practices, these essays range across
American history, from European representations of the New
World to the mass media spectacle of the Persian Gulf War. The
volume breaks down the boundary between the study of foreign relations and
American culture to examine imperialism as an internal process of cultural
appropriation and as an external struggle over international power. The
contributors explore how the politics of continental and international expansion, conquest, and resistance have shaped the
history of American culture just as much as the cultures of those it has
dominated. By uncovering the dialectical relationship between American
cultures and international relations, this collection demonstrates the
necessity of analyzing imperialism as a political or economic process
inseparable from the social relations and cultural representations of gender,
race, ethnicity, and class at home.